Webinar | Survive & Thrive in '25: Smart Strategies To Boost Fertility ROI

Of this topic in different forms, you know, on farm at the field days, and also through the Cutting the Curve podcast. Now we're gonna talk about the guys, and it's gonna be interactive. We want you to submit your questions. We want you to be interactive because that's why we do these webinars. If you are watching this replay, sorry, you can't interact, but you know what? You can if you're here live. And that's why we do these things. I've got Lee Luber, temple Roads and Matt Miles, and we're talking about smart strategies to boost your fertility. ROI we are in a situation where you absolutely have to have control of your expenses. One of our, uh, episodes of the Grainery, and if you're not watching that, you should. It's a, a show that's done with the guys from Extreme Ag at my on Farm Hangout, the Grainery. And one of the things we talked about was understanding your cost of production's. An episode that's gonna come out later on your cost of production. Well, what ties into that? Our friend Galen beer at, uh, quid talks at great length about normally a percentage of your spend goes to fertility. What if you can actually reign that in a little bit? What if you can bring it down a little bit? It could be a difference between break even and actual net profit. And that's what we're covering here today. We talked a lot about spoon feeding. We were at Temple Roads in his field day in August, and he did a huge plot where he backed off on all his four. His, the way he used to do his, his his four way of fertility management. He backed that off and he did a just in time, if you will. It's a manufacturing term that we stole from the Japanese in the 1980s, just in time fertility. What if we're doing that with your fertility on your crops, putting the fertility where it needs to be, when it needs to be there to get the maximum output from your crop? So anyway, uh, Lee, you got some pretty cool stuff going on. You've always been very good about pushing a pencil. Um, what are you gonna do to maximize your fertility and put it where it needs to be, when it needs to be there and not blow money unnecessarily on fertility? Uh, we are really dialing in on the timing aspect of it. And even though we're dry guys, you know, historically dry fertility, we've really learned the value of liquid products, uh, especially when it comes to potassium. And, uh, that's been a huge win for us. Uh, we don't even like to broadcast, uh, oh oh 60. Uh, we don't even wanna do that anymore. We're so much better off to spend a fraction of the money and put on like a sure K from Agro liquid or a Kfl K Fuel from Tommy at Nature's. And, uh, the big thing is like what you said about getting the timing right, and that's where you need to look at the crop that you're growing and when does it need that nutrient? And that's when you come in and, uh, with liquid products, we can come in and spend a fraction of the money and give the crop what it needs then and really get the bang for the buck. One of the things that a person listening to this might be sort of skeptical about, I was gonna say, all right, you live in an area that gets very limited rainfall. You farm in a very tough environment. Am I putting fertility out there even though I haven't had rainfall and getting a bang for the buck? Because somebody's gonna say it's easy for, uh, let's say Temple gets, uh, 45 inches of precipitation. He can dribble this out there. If I'm in a dry area like where you are, am I actually gonna get the bang from my buck on fertility if I has no rain for a week or 10 days? We get way more impact out of a, uh, half gallon of K fuel than we do out of broadcasting a hundred pounds or 150 pounds of oh, 60. And we're spending a fraction of the money because we're putting it on when we need it. We're getting into the plant and money saved. His money made. By the way, Matt's nodding his head. He always says, I go to him first and he doesn't like when he is not prepared. But since he is nodding his head, he's next up. All right, you don't have the issue of precipitation because you irrigate everything. This works better for you than for somebody that's dry. But maybe not necessarily what we just heard. Comment. Yeah, Well, what Mr. Lee said is a hundred percent true. And I, I'm the old, I'm the old school guy. And, and so telling me that five gallons of of K fuel would equal a hundred pounds of, of O 60, you know, my mental mind capacity couldn't handle that. Years ago, I sat down with one of our suppliers the other day and I asked him the question. I said, you know, what would it take to equal a hundred pounds of potash, a hundred pounds of KCL? Because we're putting salt out with a KCL number one. You know, Mr. Lee was talking about they're, they're getting away from that. We're trying to get away from that too. 'cause you're putting salt out, which has adverse reactions on a crop. And he said five gallons of, uh, KTS will equal a hundred pounds of pot ash. Well, I started kind of quenching up and he said, before you get mad and holler at me, listen to what I'm saying. Five pound, five gallons of KTS will equal a hundred pounds of pot ash ppms in the plant. And what we're learning is it's not about necessarily what's in the soil. It's what you get in the plant. And when Mr. Mr. Lee said timing, you know, we've learned through years of tissue samples, when the demand curve for that with any crop that we grow when it needs it, we put that, that oh 60 out in the spring, A lot of guys put it out in the fall. You don't know when it's gonna get it. But if you've got a fo your product like that, that you can put out, and I call it hitting the bullseye, you know, we, we've learned when that, when that crop, whether it's soybeans, corn, or cotton or rice needs that potassium, you can put it out at the right time. That that's kind of what I've seen. We encourage you, by the way, to put your questions in, put 'em in the chat feature right here. We wanna make this interactive so that you actually can take these lessons home to your farming operation in 2025. All right, temple, you did a big experiment. We recorded something about it for cutting the curve. We were at your field day. You did something that actually, uh, was, uh, you say revolutionary. But the truth is, I think this is where the future is going, using less upfront and putting it out when it needs to be. Because so much fertility spend has been wasted. We're learning that. Talk about your trial. So in, in My trial, we cut out basically all of our dry up front, um, and we, and we also pulled back on our nitrogen load up front too. So, you know, my idea was, is to pull that out, put it in when the plant needed it, stop worrying about balancing the soil so much and, and getting it out there and, and aiding to, and aiding to this bank of fertility that we already have out there. I felt like it was now the time to maybe pull some of that back out with the inputs that we had last year. So the idea was, is to pull it all, you know, not pull all of it out up front, but not only balance, you know, we were trying to balance the plant, not always balance the soil. And we also were trying to bind, balance our finances, you know, uh, if it stops raining in our dry land situations, we can cut that spin. But when you, you know, I won't say blow and grow method, but if you blow it all out there at one time, um, you can't get that back. But I can in season make a really good conscious decision, a educated decision I should say, on how much can I, can I actually put out, can I get away with this next pass? Can I, we got a little rain, we got a shot of rain. Can I make this happen? Um, is it too dry? Do I need to, do I need to, uh, hold up and back up some? So it, it allows you to have that capability to do that. Now the bad side is, is if you start getting a bunch of rain, there's a chance that you can't get on all of it. So that's why you, you still have to put on some upfront. You can't just cut it all out. But we did that last year where we cut a lot of it out up front. We cut out all the dry and we went back to, you know, what Lee and, and Matt were saying, you know, 'cause we sp spread, you know, 150 pounds of actual K out there, actual, not just pounds of oh, 60 actual pounds. And we've done that for years and years and years. And that was something that we needed to cut back on. So if I can feed the plant exactly what it needs, that's all I needed to do. And then keeping it ahead, ahead of it, you know, how many times have we talked about, you know, proactive makes money, reactive loses money, and as long as you stay proactive and you stay just in front of those curves when those plants actually need it, it seemed like it really worked out. You know, we, we did it in years past, you know, on smaller acres and it just seems like it always panned out. Take it back all the way back to, you know, Damon, you and I did something with Chad Henderson the other day out to your granary, and he talked about putting out, um, a a, a dry fertility load all up front that would grow four or 500 bushels an acre according to, you know, all the recommendations that you would read. And he did it on 20 acres and for three years he's never seen it in a crop. It's never showed up on a yield maps, nothing. And he, and he, and it also never showed up in his soil samples. So it, it goes back to, I'm not sure if we totally understand the whole process, but what I will tell you is, is what we're learning and we're learning it so fast, I think it changes the way that we farm in the next five to 10 years. By the way, you also told me that I like to word use the word fling, uh, because that's what I think we used to do was fling fertilizer. And, and by the way, uh, I think we should revisit that real quickly. And then by the way, if you've not watched the grain reed, please go and watch it. It's an awesome show. It's me and the guy sitting around in my on-farm hangout talking about real stuff that real farmers think about. Anyway, what Chad realized was he always says, you can do what the co-op recommends and put out enough to grow four oh bushel corn. And the idea used to be, well, you're building up the soil bank, or what do we always used to say? Well, if you're not putting enough out there, you're mining the soil. Kelly Garretts mentioned this. There's no such thing as mining the soil. It's more about balance. Because the point is a bunch of fertility. Matt, I'm gonna go to you, you said you can feed a infant, uh, three cheeseburgers. They have no need for that. You're putting out stuff that's never gonna get utilized and you're wasting money. Yeah, absolutely. And and like I said earlier, I was an old school guy. That's hard for me to get mentally, you know, and, and everybody's farming practices are different. Everybody's soils are different. So I'm not saying that a guy needs to do what we're doing with some of these trials on his whole farm, you know? 'cause I got in some situations last year with my litter, litter's always been my, my go-to thing and, and I had some yield reduction with some of my cotton acres by relying just on litter. I don't know what happened. Some of it didn't break down right. I don't, because I had plenty of units out there. But Chad and I were flying over to land at our airport and I said, Chad, that's my farm right there. And we looked down there and I said, oh s**t. He said, what's wrong? I said, you see that red tent to that cotton? I said, I'm out of potassium. You know, so ev so one size don't fit all is what I'm saying. You know, a guy needs to really look at his souls, a Midwestern soul like Kelly's is a whole lot different than the three of us on this webinar. And, and see, but, but be open-minded because these products are working and there's also products out there that will, you know, subsidize your phosphorus. There's things out there that we can apply that will actually use the phosphorus in the ground or the nitrogen in the ground. You know, there's biology out there that will convert, you know, some of these, some of this stuff to nitrogen through the atmosphere. And there's some pretty cool stuff going on if you're open-minded to be able to, to try. You know, I got, um, let, let me just say this. Um, Matt just talked about how our soils are so different and all three of us on here, um, very, very different soil types. I mean, Matt, some of Matt and i's mine are, are fairly similar. But what's not different is when you start to treat a plant like this, every plant, whether it's grown on leaves, farm, my farm or Matt farm, it still has the same needs at any one given time. Yeah. It's got the exact same needs. So that's the one thing that's in common here, where you can get away from the whole thing of, well it's Midwest ground and I don't have ground like that. It still is gonna react the same to putting on something in a timely manner. Hey Lee, you're nodding your head and I wanna point out the person that's watching this, you have more hair now than any time I've ever known you in the last three and a half years. Is this what happens? Is that, is this a function to try and stay warm? Are these ear muffs you're putting on? What's going on here? You're rubbing off on me, Damien. All right, I got a question to Q before I get the question to QI want to go with this. I've been to your farm to pretend that it's all about soil and, and that the person that's saying, you know what, it's easy for these guys to say I have sand. Well, I've been to, uh, Arkansas, whereas Will says, do you actually have top soil or you have soil on top of the land? You've got rich organic matter. You've done a great job. You and Terry have built up the organic composition. You don't even let people drive across your wheat stubble because of fear of catching it on fire. And you wanna make sure that you can continually return the organic matter to the soil. It's easy for someone to say, oh yeah, these guys get away with that. I can't because of my soils. I want you to respond because the point is you have built up organic matter, but you're still doing this thing and not saying, oh yeah, it's just because of my soil. You were doing this probably before most people in terms of just in time application of fertility. Uh, that's the thing. Temple hit the nail on the head. It doesn't matter where you're at. A plant needs what it needs, when it needs it. And it comes down to plant physiology. Uh, if you look at soybeans, they're gonna have a huge draw down in potassium in the R stages as they start the flower. Why do you want to be out broadcasting two 300 pounds of oh, 60 front loading when you can come in full layer for a fraction of the money and give the plant what it needs, when it needs. Uh, same thing on corn. It needs its potassium at a certain time. You want to be aware of that when the plant needs it and be providing it. Then, uh, wheat has a longer bell curve. Uh, before extreme ag existed, I ran across research from Fred Belo from University of Illinois, and he is all about nutrient uptake of plants. And it doesn't matter if he did it in Illinois, a corn plant's a corn plant, it doesn't matter where you're at it, what it needs. And he, and he breaks down all the nutrients. And now as eye opening for me on corn and soybeans, and then now with extreme ag, uh, with our sponsors, they've got people on staff, they can work with us and even our members to try to tell you when your plan's gonna be needing your NPK, when you need to focus on copper, boron, all these things. And that's how you gotta do it. You gotta dial in when you need it. It doesn't matter where you're at. A corn plant never changes, you know, it doesn't matter if it's Arkansas or Egypt or wherever. Uh, a corn plant is a corn plant and it's gonna need its nutrients and you've gotta be aware of the physiology of the plant and when it's needing its nutrients and then be there providing what it needs. Uh, and that doesn't really change depending on climate or even, uh, uh, precipitation. I mean, you still need it to get through it and get to the next level. And that's where also Temple said about being proactive. And that's the big key that we all look at is proactive farming, not reactive farming, proactive farming. You're in the game, you're in the fight. You have a chance to make money on your crop. Reactive farming, you're already behind. You're just mitigating your losses. And we're out there trying to stay ahead of it with what we know, what the plant needs, let's be on it and be providing it, even if it's spoon feeding it, but give it what it needs. Initiate the triggers and get to the yield. Well, and, and Damon I'll say this when he is talking about reactive, when when Chad and I seen that crop down there and it had a red tent to it, and I knew my potash was deficient on the real sandy part of the field, it's too late. You know, if you don't know your plant, you don't know when the key times is to put the nutrients out. I knew when we landed, I went straight out there, but I knew that I, there was really nothing I was gonna be able to do to make that plant come back, you know? So if you've gotta hit those key points and put that f fertility out when it needs to be there, and it's simple math. I mean, like he said, Fred Belo done a lot of research on it. There's bell curves, there's demand curves out there, and you really need 'em for your own farm too, you know, but as Temple said, a plant's a plant, there's certain times it's gonna need certain nutrients no matter what situation you're in. The one by the way, go ahead, temple. The one thing that, that, that would be a little bit different for all of us, and I've seen this, you know, over the years talking to Matt. Um, the difference is, is like for Lee and I, our opportunity of of being able to go out there and make that pay us is a lot longer window than what it is for Matt. Because when Matt's got all that heat, and I, Matt, you might talk about that. I mean, you, you raced to get there, like your window's so short. Yeah, our grain, our grandfield period compared to theirs, I don't know what the exact numbers would be, but I'm probably, I've got about half the time to three quarters of the time to get those nutrients if I wait. We've done a lot of studies on this late fertility, and, and by the time it, we, we, we hadn't had real good results outta that where we're at. Because by the, by the, by those late grow growth stages in Arkansas that plan's saying, Hey, I'm not worried about fertility. I'm trying to stay alive. Mm, you know, I want all the water I can get and I'm just trying to stay alive so we don't get the reaction. Timber's got some double digit numbers on some super late fertility that I hadn't been able to get just because the difference in the heat. We have some questions I wanna get to Dale. Guy asks, how are you determining what and how many nutrients to apply to your crop? And whoever wants to take that, who's got an answer for that? Well, There's, well far as our situation, when we get, when the combine goes through, before we apply our poultry litter, we're pulling grid samples. So, you know, that's, that's probably the most depleted time you'll have a crop. So, so that's when we pull our soil samples at that point. Then we apply our litter, and then we take the analysis of the litter and subtract it from our yield gold, you know, our algorithm and our soil samples for our yield gold. And that's what we'll apply, you know, from there. And, and we won't do that in the fall. There's a lot of guys around here doing fall, you know, fall potash or fall oh, oh 60. And you know, in sandy soils like that, I, I think you gotta, I think you gotta wait. That's where the spoon feeding comes in. That's my opinion. Temple. Um, the, He asked about, uh, this and, and the, the, it's interesting, you know, there, these companies, like for instance, and I'll just use, um, nature's for instance, they've got a really cool little chart and they can, they can give you when those bell curves, when that's gonna happen. And it's funny, the first time that I ever met with, you know, Tommy, he showed me this chart and, and I was like enamored by it. And I went back and I looked at my tissue samples over the last, you know, 10 years or whatever, and I started like dialing through 'em. And you start to look at 'em, you're like, holy crap. It's at the exact time. Because like before, I was always trying to set it up by the timing when I knew that that bell curve was getting ready to happen, that I, I had a ramp up that I was using phosphorus. I had a ramp up where I was, where my, my, my plant was starting to, um, dial down, you know, go down in potassium and I knew it well. It was exactly the same as this chart that they came up with. So nature's has got a really cool little chart, and it'll actually tell you like the percentages of your total intake. So you take what your plant food that you need, let's just say you need, um, you know, on your dry land, your goal is to have 180 pounds of n and 65 pounds of phosphorus and 150 pounds of, of potassium. You can literally go by that chart. And each one of them stages will tell you like from, um, from emergence to V six, it might need like 11% of the total phosphorus of its needs or in that timeframe. So just take the, the number and then you can figure it right out and you know exactly what to put on in each one of them windows. And that's what I did. And, and, and come to find out, it was very, very close and very, very similar to what I was already doing by years and years of tissue sampling, finding out where them bell curves are. So I think one, it just goes to show that, you know, they came up with this study and they're showing me the exact same thing that on my soil that's happening. They didn't do those testing with on a corn plant in my soil. A plant is a plant, it needs what it needs. And there there's, there's, there's literature out there, there's stuff out there that you can find, and it's tremendous literature. And you can do the math on your own with your own goals and boom, you can figure out exactly what to put on all the way through. By the way, uh, at several our field days, nature's did bring that, uh, that diagram, if you will, where it showed the actual plant with an illustration and it showed the nutrient requirements at that stage of production. So this is another reason you should come to our field days because this is a great, I to use the word illustrative, which I used in the grainery. And my friend, uh, Matt, oh, he said, what, what the hell are you talking about? Anyway, uh, it's very illustrative and it also shows you exactly what you need when you need it. And it's brilliant. You can probably find that in andrews.com, I'm guessing. But they did bring it out at our field days and I thought it was lovely. Stick with questions here. Dan Lane says, how important are the calcium levels in soil when you spoon feed? Who wants to take that lee? You got that calcium levels. Who's got calcium levels? The importance of calcium levels when you spoon feed? Does it matter? Our calcium levels, we are very fortunate here, uh, on our loam soils. We're really in a sweet spot where it works well for boron, copper, you name it. We're very fortunate in that aspect. We really are. Our natural calcium levels are really good. So that, that does make my job a little bit easier. I wanna talk about calcium. First off, Kelly's normally our calcium guy. 'cause that was the thing a few years ago. He started talking about calcium levels and then monitoring and all that. Um, if you're watching this and you're saying, where's Kelly? He's celebrating his 50th birthday right now in a Caribbean island. And if you can imagine a guy walking around with a plaid shirt with no sleeves on it, a cowboy hat mirrored glasses, and we think a thong we are, we don't wanna see it, but we think it, we think he's probably somewhere in a Cayman Islands running around in a thong with a flannel shirt that's got the sleeves cut off it. God help the rest of the tourists. All right, going with questions some more. Um, Andy Banal asks, oh, by the way, let's stick with Dan Lane. If you have high calcium levels, do you need as much potassium in the soil? I, who wants to take the calcium to potassium ratio? Temple Lee, do you wanna take that? Or you, I got something else on calcium if you wanna take that, Go with calcium temple. Um, the calcium thing, keep in mind that if you have high calcium levels in your soil, as soon as you introduce any phosphorus to the soil, you're gonna have a tie up. So you gotta be very careful that, so, you know, things like UltraCharge helps untie that for you. So it, it can help balance the plant naturally on its own. So it can take up the amount of calcium and the amount of pot, or the amount of actually, of potassium and of phosphorus all in the same lick. So if you do have calcium issues, yeah, you, you probably should be looking at at least a baseline of putting something in there that helps it from tying up phosphorus immediately. He said potassium though. Um, um, the potassium issue, calcium, potassium. Um, there, there is a correlation between them two and they do things, um, fairly similarly, but they, they work very well together and they can work very much against each other. So, um, if you do have high calcium ratios, Lee, does that make it, uh, it pulls up less potassium, is that right? Yeah, well, you know, our, we have some ground in the next county over and real high phs, you know, eight plus and, uh, yeah, real high calcium, real high phs. And it's just, it's, it's hard to move the needle. It really is just to get the uptake. It's, uh, we have better luck, uh, running high levels of a MS for dry fertility to help floate the soil. That helps a lot. It's like, it's like a, it's, you're adding fertility, but you're buffering, you're locating And then, wait, wait, wait, wait. Focus on, wait, wait, wait, Wait. Hey, wait. 00:24:41.165 --> 00:24:41.345 Locating, are you making stuff up? Locating, yes. It's a term. I didn't make that up, Damien. Seriously, what's Flo What's to the person like me? That's uneducated. What's locating, locating? It's uh, it's literally like, uh, it literally almost loosen the soil a little bit and it's like freeing up nutrients. It's freeing things up. It's, it's like you're adding a a, a buffer to it and it's helping free things up. And that's where we have, we run a MS at a ratio with urea. But you know, when we get in high clay, real high pH soils, we've experimented with running straight a MS. If you can get a custom applicator to put it on, its real high rates. It will just seem to op, open up the soil. It's like we don't have access to lime in our area. We're so far from any anything to get it. The trucking is a killer, but what we've experimented with a MS has been a game changer. Locating, opening up the soil. It's just like, it's freeing things up. Things are working better. Uh, yeah, it, but high pH is high clay, high calcium. It's a challenge. It really is. We haven't figured it out yet, but we've seen some real cool things with, uh, switching out a ratio of urea and a MS that we run that works well together on loam soils and going straight ammonium sulfate, high rate of ammonium sulfate in a dry blend, dry form. And that seems to open up and floate the soil. Actually the soil will even get softer. Uh, it for it. It's pretty cool what we're seeing. So are you saying that it's adding porosity to the soil, Lee? It actually, we've seen changes in porosity to the soil. It's like, it's like we, uh, lined, but we don't have access to lime. Uh, got a good friend in northwest Ohio. He is, he is just surrounded by sources. And he had, I remember the first time in his farm and it's like real tight clay, high phs. And, and like you said, it's been a game changer for them to come in and, and get it from the plants and bring it in and put it on high rates. And it's like, well Glenn, we can't do that. We're so far away from any sources that the trucking charges are just astronomical. And, and they started, uh, researching it and doing some reading. And, uh, there's an area, I think it was in Michigan, I was reading about a group of growers that were in a similar soil type, and they went to experimenting with high rates of ammonium sulfate. And I know even at the hefty field day, uh, back when they had the, uh, plots, I remember, uh, there was some experiments with high rates of ammonium sulfate and how it like loosened up the soil and freed up nutrients. And when we've started to play with that in our high clay, high pH, high calcium soils, we're starting to see the same thing. Have You, I wanna ask the question, though, about pota. Hang on a second. The question about though, do you need more less applied potassium or if there's, we've Been going just strictly foliar on the potassium. When we, when we're in that style of soil, uh, that's the only way we can get any kind of return broadcast is just wasted money. So if I have a high Cal soil issue I do in Our environment, We was our money, we've done, I'd be cognizant of my applied potassium and probably look at ramping it up. Is that what I'm hearing? Uh, we, we go strictly foliar. We will only spend money on foliar on our loam soils. We've pretty much ratcheted down to where we are foliar. But in our high calcium, high pH, high clay soils, we'll only spend money in potassium if it is foliar, that's because we're getting it into the plant. Otherwise, we've got our soil working against US temple and we can't get it in there. I was gonna say that the, the guys that I know that have high, really high calcium and they struggle getting potassium in the plant, the better like a potassium acetate from, you know, a bio K, um, from, you know, K fuel, whatever it is from, uh, nature's or what whatever potassium acetate source there is out foliar, they get a way better efficiency rate from somebody that has, um, soil that is a little more balanced of the calcium, the magnesium ratio. All right. Um, I'm gonna go, we haven't heard from Matt for a while. All right, we got Andy, you been fall. Question on that. So Mr. Lee, have, you've seen with the high rates of a MSI was talking to a guy the other day, foreign country, and they were using high rates of a MS and they were, their aluminum levels were going up because of that. Have you paid any attention to your aluminum levels by when your piling the a MS on? We've just started experimenting with it the last three years and we have not checked on that. So that's something now that we need to look at, because that's the one thing we all need to be aware of. As you're pushing and trying to amplify pot potential, potential positives, you can get the potential negatives to happen. Like Matt just said, where aluminum comes up, maybe it could be, you know, we don't wanna meddles the issue to happen because of it, so we better be aware of that if we're, if we are gonna keep experimenting with that. Matt, you anything on that? Otherwise, we're go to the next question. I'm, I'm, I'm actually, I I I deal more with low pH than I do high pH or low calcium versus high. So, you know, that's something we have to make sure that we keep at a, a 6.5 on a, on a pH schedule, you know, or, or look at our, uh, base saturations because if you don't have enough pH, it will absolutely not let the nutrients go in the plant. And I will say this too, look at your different sources of, of potassium fos. 'cause like the both temple and Mr. Lee alluded to the acetate is there's graphs on this, there's data on this. That's the absolute premium way to get potassium into your plant. Whether it's K fuel, kfl, uh, foliar K from concept, uh, you know, there everybody's got a potassium astate, but look at that because it, it's more efficient to get the potassium in the plant than, than the carbonates or anything else is. Alright, we're gonna go to other questions. Andy, hub Bethal who farms about an hour west of my place in Indiana and Temple and I were there with our girl Shelly just last August, uh, doing some filming of some cool stuff on soybean trials they did. I encourage you to go and check that out. Remember at Extreme Magno Farm, we are absolutely in a library of information that you can use for free to help you farm better videos that we're shooting out there in the field days and also at other people's farms where we're doing trials, et cetera, et cetera. Go and check that out. It's a cool thing that we did. Uh, temple and Andy teamed up on that. Um, Andy Ental asked, should the application timing be based off of grower degree units or growth stage? I guess he's talking about is, are we talking about, I don't know if Andy can chime in here. Are we talking about application of, uh, new potassium presumably to make up for the calcium? I think Just, he's probably just talking about nutrients in general. Um, and, and I think what was the reason that Andy's probably talking about this because we did a trial, Chad and I did a trial the last two or three years on trying to get that late application on corn perfectly because, you know, um, growth stages are one thing and you can be at a growth stage of let's just call it, you know, VV eight or whatever, but to, to time in on the gdu really pinpoints that exact number where that plant actually is. So Chad and I like to get that late application. We did one where we were, we were putting on late season phosphorus, late season potassium and some other stuff. And we did it at like, uh, I can't remember what it was, 1900, 2100 and like 2300. And it seemed like the, the sweet spot was like at 2100 gdu. Now that was also on one per specific hybrid as well, like that hybrid itself finished up at 2,790 gdu. So we took that number and said, well, okay, well if we back that off, we need to be at least 600 and some odd gdu from finish. And if we can, if we can pinpoint that, what gave us the biggest ROI, um, we really got it licked. So Chad and I worked on that one year and then we kind of, the next couple years we really tried to fine tune that and I think that that's what Andy's getting at. Yeah, if you can figure it out by, on your own farm, by the gdu, you've got an exact precise ROI because it, it really swayed, like, you know, at 1900 it was good. Um, at 2100 it was great and at 2300 it was, it was diminishing. So, I mean, it wasn't diminishing bad, but it went back the other way. So there is some really, really sweet spots in there, but I think that you gotta figure that out on your own farm with your own, um, kind of with your own hybrid. Well, and, and, and to what Temple's saying, JV has a, has a, uh, field trial at his field day and, and it's split turn row and one side is high input, you know, high yield corn and the other side is just, you know, more low input, I would say. And he is got different varieties there. It's so we don't, we, I don't think we pay enough attention to what temple alluded to the variety. 'cause there's so many varieties that do things so different that that it, and that may have been my problem when I put on late season fertilizer. It might have had something to do with the variety I was looking at, you know, so it it's almost, you're almost chasing your tail sometimes because some of these varieties are so, they have so different characteristics, they do things differently. All right, we're gonna keep with questions here. We've got John Burson asking the question, has anyone found a good nutrient timing chart for soy? Um, I guess we just talked about the one on corn that we saw at, like I said at the field at first, I saw it was at Kevin Matthews Field Day in August for that nature's put out. And I know that the other companies, agri, liquid, et cetera, are always talking about putting the stuff out right when you need it to be. And they're, they're great about educating the con the, the farmer on this. Have you seen one on soy go around the horn here? Temple's nodding his head. We got one from soy Temples been, you need to answer that one. Nature's has got the same one. Um, for, for corn, soybeans, and wheat. Um, the ones that I've seen, it's the exact same. It's, it's, it is, they have the exact same one for different crops, but their their needs are very, very different. And what I found out with soybeans is, um, they're a little more, um, receptive to certain, um, micronutrients where, you know, let's just say you put Molly on corn, you won't see a huge response. You put zinc on corn, um, at certain timings you see huge responses and those are shown in the charts. Um, and, and beans are very, very different. Um, so yes, they are out there. Hey wait, what's Molly shorthand for Temple Meibum. Say it again. Maum. I can't say it right either. You say it. Molybdenum, molybdenum, molybdenum. I can say it three times. I can say it seven times. All right, that's What I said. I will, I will say this and Tibble may agree or disagree to me, the sweet spot on soybeans, if you're gonna, if if you, if you got a limited budget, the R two and a half to R three, that is the sweet spot to, to put a load of, not load of nutrients on your, on your soybean plan. Yep. All right, we're gonna, we've got another question here, and I'm gonna, I'm I gonna, I was gonna text my friend Will here and say, is it Corey Hulk or Corey Huke? I'm sorry Corey, I don't, I don't know for sure, but you've got a great question. The time of day for foliar feeding applications make a difference. I'm gonna get that question first and we'll come to you a second part of your question. He typed in two questions in one time of day for foliar feeding applications. Make a difference, Lee, Uh, earlier in the day, uh, and in the evenings, uh, you know, our issue in our environment is in the summertime is just getting too damn hot. You know, the same thing for Matt, Matt, Matt talks about this all the time. I remember in a previous webinar, Matt said, when the temperature spikes above 80 or 85 degrees Fahrenheit, you pull the sprayers off the field. Am I right? Yeah, we, I mean, we, we try to, you know, there's certain times we have to, we have to just bust through it and hope for the best. But if we're, if we're running, you know, during those really smoking hot temperatures around 11 o'clock, you know, we're gonna stop. And we may not go back and spray again till an hour before dark, you know, because even in our area, we if three or four o'clock in the afternoon, it's still gonna be a heat index over a hundred. So it does make a difference. Now, you know, it depends on your sprayer power and how much time you have. And you know, I sometimes I have to fudge some of that because we just gotta get the job done. But I know I'm less efficient in those kind of temperatures. And if you're gonna go in those higher temperatures or in the more heat of the day, add more water. By the way, aren't you? I always pay attention. I'm the one that said, I've heard this a number of times after 80, 85 degrees. Am I right? Is it 80 or 85? When you say pull the sprayers About 85 degrees, we look at heat index, you know, when we're getting in the middle of the summer because that's, that, that's the most important thing for us. And For the person, for the person that's just tuning in here, where do you farm? It's little something, Little Vietnam is what I call it. But, but we can't really go. I think the 85 degrees may be, you know, some of the guys in the, in the north we're never 80, we're never less than eight, five degrees. So we're gonna push that number, you know, but, but that's the proper way to do it. But sometimes that's not always feasible for us, Honestly, isn't it more like, it might already be 80 degrees at 10 in the morning, but if the intensity of the sun, maybe you're still getting the absorption, isn't that kind of an issue in little Vietnam? Yep. Solid. Sticking with Cory's question, uh, could you possibly see a noticeable bushel response from early morning to a middle afternoon? I think we kind of covered that from Matt, uh, Tim, uh, sorry Lee, since you farm where it gets atrociously hot during the day and you have a lack of moisture, there's humidity where he is where you are, you're out there when it's hot, you might struggle, I'm guessing, with absorption just because there's very little humidity and it's hot. If you wanna maximize your efficacy, you wanna be out earlier in the day. Uh, what we do, uh, we run a, uh, food grade fulvic. And what the fulvic does is it opens up the tada. So we're getting things into the plant, so we push the envelope a lot longer because of that fact we're able to keep, we're able to open up our Tada and get it into the plant. So that's a little trick that we do. We're going stick with questions, by the way. I, he got, he's, it's like Samson, he grew his hair out and all of a sudden his vocabulary grew. He's using STEM and Flo Floate. I'll tell you what, Dude, I said these, I said these words years ago, you weren't listening. It's hard for me to listen sometimes because I dunno if you ever know, sometimes I'm around Chad and Temple and it's hard to sometimes focus because they sometimes are a little bit like, uh, shall I say, there's a little bit of background noise, Diamond, we say this all the time, Mr. The rest of us are playing checkers and Mr. Lee's playing chess. So there's a, there's a different level there where he is farming and he's in a chess game and we're all playing checkers. I already asked Mrs. Mason to grab me a di a dictionary for when this is done, because I'm gonna look up the ADA and Floate. Anyway, we're gonna stick with our questions here. Aaron Miller asked a question, do any of you spread gypsum for help on calcium and magnesium levels? Who wants to grab that? We have done the gypsum to try to, we got really high mag in our high clay soils, our high CC soils the problem now today. And it works. It, it's, it's, it's very cumbersome to do. And our problem in today's world is you can't find it. You know, we're in you Gypsum, you can't find gypsum. Yeah, we can't get gypsum down here for a reasonable price. It's very expensive. But, but if you're, if you have access to gypsum, it will help this By the, by the way, I, I'm seriously, I I, where, where is, why is there a gypsum shortage where you are, where is gypsum come from? I don't know. It comes from north, from up north. Okay. Well, it doesn't really make a lot of difference. I mean, they, they make it, um, you know, in, in Richmond, Virginia, which is only three hours from me, Matt, and it's still expensive as hell. I mean, it's terrible expensive. So if you have a gypsum source that you can get, it is a tremendous product and you can fix a lot of things with it. Like Matt said, if your magnesium, the calcium ratio is off, um, and you need to get your calcium up, man, there ain't nothing like gypsum. 'cause gypsum is that, and it's a, and it's a huge source of sulfur as well. So I have literally helped fix soil and it'll add porosity to your soil and it will just wake it up. It's a fantastic product. Problem is it's expensive. And if you can even get ahold of it, so if he, so if he's got a way to get ahold of it, yeah, it works. You can fix some low lying soils, heavy clay head porosity, and it'll turn that ground around. And he says specifically about calcium and magnesium. I mean, is that where you guys have seen response on those two? Well, it'll lower the it, yeah. Yeah. It'll lower the magnesium, which gets the ratio, your base saturations and your ratio better. Got it, by the way. Um, does it help with location? Anyway, I'm just going out there. All right, let's talk about, uh, Jeff Fritz question, what do you consider a high rate of ammonium sulfate? I think since Lee went down the road of a MS, what's a high rate of ammonium sulfate? What in your, in your part of the world? Uh, 400 pounds an acre, and up to as high as a thousand. Uh, well, we run in our urea the standard, but we've ran sulfur for well over 25 years before people talked about it. We were doing it. And, uh, we settled in on a ratio, and that seemed to work well for us. And then I actually, uh, sat down and listened to Neil Kinsey speak for the first time. And what we were running for ratio is what he advocates. And it doesn't matter where you farm, it's, it's a ratio that he advocates, and that's four to four and a half to one. So we're running, you know, four pounds of urea of product versus one pound of sulfur. So we're running 4, 4, 4 and a half to one. And that's a good ratio where what the sulfur's doing is it's increasing the efficacy of your urea. It's really helping you out. Uh, you're getting a lot more bang for your buck, uh, that it, it's really, it's, it's not only gained yield, it's, it's gained on the efficacy and what gets into the plant. It's, it's a win across multiple aspects of it. But yeah, we've been big, huge proponents of sulfur for years in our dry blend. Anybody also on Sulfate Temple or Matt? No. All right. Uh, by the way, I wanna remind you that if you are going to attend Commodity Classic, look us up. We are gonna be all over Denver. Uh, well at the, uh, convention center list, we're gonna be there for all kinds of stuff at Commodity Classic from beginning till end. And we're gonna be in booths. We're gonna be in all of our business partner booths. We're gonna be shooting videos, talking about what's new and why you need it on your farming operation if you can't attend. But if you can't attend, we're gonna be doing panels. And most, uh, notably, we're gonna be doing a pancake breakfast on Sunday, March 2nd at 9:45 AM I'm gonna be playing the part of game show host Gene Rayburn. Look it up. Not right now, but go and look it up. Uh, it's gonna be a, the Farmer Match game. We're gonna have six of the extreme ag personalities up there, and we're gonna have two contestants, two different times. It's gonna be a lot of fun. It's gonna be cool, it's gonna be fun. And also you get your belly fed after you go to church at Commodity Classic on Sunday morning, 9:45 AM Make sure you're there. Mark your calendar. We wanna see you there. Also in various booths throughout the entire commodity class, we're gonna be doing a lot of cool stuff. Another question from Jared Locke is your magnesium levels on the highest, on the higher side to apply that much a MS. So I guess you wanna stick with Lee and then whoever wants to take it from there. Are you saying you got high magnesium levels? Is that why you're putting up so much a MS? We're just kinda rebels. So we're, we're just out there doing it. And uh, what we've seen is what some other people have seen at the same time is it's actually in, it's actually lowered phs where we have high phs. It's brought phs down, located the soil. And you love that word now, Damien. It's your new favorite. And, uh, it's, it's helped to release nutrients that, that weren't available. And, uh, it's, it's something totally different that we're playing with. And uh, but like I said, the kicker is if you're doing custom application, try telling 'em was like, Hey, I want you to put on 600 pounds. They get kind of growly about that, you know, uh, 'cause we're filling all the time, but we're kind of seeing some cool things by it. But we're able to take higher phs, lower the phs closer to the sweet spot, uh, and, uh, nutrient availability is, is coming up. Stick with questions. I want to address this to the other two guys since we've heard a lot from Lee that a MS you talked helps with high pH soils. What fertilizer helps raise the low pH sandy soil, potassium nitrate. I guess we're gonna go to sandy soil. Maybe Matt's our guy on that possibly temple. Um, somebody more agronomically inclined. This is from Matthew Romero. Uh, high pH soils fertilizer helps raise the low pH sandy soil and the potassium nitrate. I'm not sure where he is going there, but you guys know more about it. Yeah, take that temple. 'cause I'm not, I don't a hundred percent understand the question. I Don't really understand that question either. Read it one more time. Alright, Matthew, do me a favor and type in it again and ask a, a little bit more specific, not because we're being, uh, wieners here, we just kind of wanna make sure we address this correctly. Again, we love the fact that these webinars are so interactive. That's why we do this every month here at extreme Ag. It's about you and we wanna make sure that we're helping you as best we can. So type it in again, please, if you would, so we can get more to the actual question and get you answered. Stick with questions. Dan Lane says, Matt, I've seen video. Damien, if I can just, I, the question I think just so we can kill that one off. The question is, uh, what fertilizer helps raise low PH sandy soil? There is, We don't, I don't know that there is one, Matt, I'll say in, in soil by any fertility. The only thing that is gonna raise pH is, is adding lime. And it's whatever lime that that you need on your soil. You need to know, if you have a high cow soil, you need to add a high mag lime. If you got a high mag soil, you need to add more calcium. Keep in mind your calcium to, to magnesium ratio needs to be seven to one. So you look at that on your base saturations, when you look at that, you try to figure out, try to get some work close to the seven to one, and then if you need to add lime, because you gotta look, it's gonna help bring up soil. A MS is the only thing that will help get down. Like for years ago, you know, for me, we had a farm that had a lot of sludge added to it. Well, they drove the pH real high and we couldn't grow crap on it because it was like around eight and we knew how to grow crops. So we went out there and we added a MS to it and we drove those, those, those things down. So we're, now it's staying where it is. Be careful when you're driving some of 'em down because we drove on certain tools. Maybe it's because I got sandy soil. We drove it down and then after we drove it down, we were like, okay, we're where we need to be at. We're getting pretty close, and then the bottom falls out of it. So it literally went like, and went over. All right, sticking with this John Burson then, does seven to one calcium mag ratio apply across all soils? And I guess he's asking if that's a standard, if that's a norm. And Matt not head. Take that Matt, please. I think so. I mean, I mean, Tim knows more about base setss and stuff than I do. 68 12 was the number I always was, was spo, you know, I used, but I mean, I, I think it's kinda like we was talking about the plant demand, no matter where you're at, I think the, the calcium mag ratio is the same no matter what. Soil soils don't change. Our areas don't change what the base SATs need to be. All right. We got another question. I wanna make sure that we're, uh, dialing back into spacing out your fertility spin. I mean I love the questions and that's what we're here for. We'll make this interactive as possible, but I wanna make sure you guys are thinking the back of your head. Matt always likes when I give him lots of preparation time, um, about spacing out your fertility spin. Again, it's the adjustment you've made. You're the one on the call here, the participant, if you will, Matt, that's made the biggest adjustments on backing off of how you used to do things and all that. So be thinking about that on, on the strategies to boost your fertility's return on investment, especially in a low commodity price environment. The question from Dan Lane is, Matt, I've seen video from your farm showing cal boar since you have lower pH, do you feel that the calcium from Cal boar helps your foliar feeding to work better? I do. So, and it's funny that he asked that question because you know, I, and, and, and I'm, I'm talking specifically with cotton. So I've never had a tissue sample anytime during the year after fruiting on cotton after fir pinhead square where my calcium levels were excessive, maybe not even sufficient. And so we've really concentrated on trying to find a foliar product that would work to, to put calcium in the plant. You know, we, we thought 10 years ago you couldn't get calcium in the plant, you know, through a foliar type product. Uh, I think it's trans orb or trans max, uh, technology that concept agritech has with that. And we now, we didn't, we're not, we're not hitting a home run with this all the time, but we are able to get our calcium levels and our tissues higher using that product, you know, and it will get into the plant. I will say that, uh, we've done several different tests on it and, and of course we need to bore on anyway. And with that Trans Max technology, we're actually able to, to get that calcium into the plant, into the tissue sample. And that's what we're looking at. It's not necessarily what's in the soil. Sometimes it's what you got in your plant. 'cause that's what's gonna make the yield. Alright, Yes. Good temple. What are your calcium levels? I assume, you know, across, and I'm sure it varies from field to field and part of the bay and whatever. Uh, um, it does. It's, I mean it's, it's so erratic. I mean, um, just for instance, Damon, you were down there with me and we were through the ground and I was showing you guys how we got an oyster shell in our ground so that that ground type, like our calcium levels are, are very, very high. Um, that soil, actually, I've never had to apply lime on it because my phs stay up, my calcium stays up. So I do have to, so my calcium levels are actually have what you would consider low calciums. So our soils are lower cow, higher mag, so we always have to apply high calcium line. Um, and that gives us the most bang for a buck in our really, really tight, uh, clay soils. Again, it's, it's, it's really high mag, really low cow. And that's why gypsum works so well in those areas because that just, because the only way to get calcium on in your soil to try to balance your soil somewhat is you either have to get in through Lyme or you gotta get it in through gypsum one of those two. Well, if your LY levels are all your phs are already six five or above, you'll need to add more Lyme. So you gotta add gypsum. So it's, it's a balancing act. But, but keep in mind those levels need to always be kind of seven to one. That's what it need to be. Seven cal one magnesium. If you can keep them levels like that, you get a lot more porosity in your soil. Your soil works much better. You don't tie up some many nutrients. 'cause you know, magnesium ties up as many nutrients sometimes is what cow does. Alright, uh, I'm go to the mat with this. I heard you should not foliar if the temperature humidity combined are over one 40. Is this bs by the way? I gotta check on my dogs real quick. So take that, Matt, please. Well, I was looking at that, you know, if we're, if, if, if we go with that, you know, our, our humidity's high in the mornings, but our temperature's lower. If we go later in the day when it's hotter, then our humidity's a little bit lower, but it's so hot that, that some of the, the fos will evaporate, you know, before it hits the plant. So I don't think it's bs and, and I've seen the end of his question. I I don't ever get to that point, so I really don't know. But, uh, I, you know, I think, I think if you had, if you can wait till the optimum time to spray, then I think, I think that's, you know, something you should definitely look at, Well here's, here's one for you. Like, I, I mean if that might be BI don't know if it is or not, 'cause I don't know that you can combine them two ever down there where you are and not come up with like a 200 net. But, um, it's about as it is and as humid, humid as it is down there. So I don't know that they say that, you know, that a lot of these guys with foliar feeds and, and they've done testing and they say that the best time to spray is like from midnight to like three o'clock in the morning. Well, none of us are gonna do that. We, we, we realize it. There might be times where we've had to do it, but none of us are gonna do that, uh, across every acre. But basically what it's saying is, is that plant needs to respirate and when that, when that plant's respirating, that's when it'll help take that, take that those nutrients up. You know, um, I'll just give you this Damien, and I don't know if this helps add the question at all. I've seen where when we add something like spray text ec to the, to our foliar, um, blend, I, it seems like it, it drives it into the plant and our efficiency of that foliar feed is dramatically increased. Now there is it that it's a pH adjuster and adjust the pH and it helps that, um, helps balance all that. I don't know which one it is, but for me it's magical. I'm gonna, I'm gonna say, and, and, and you kind of stole my thunder on that, if I almost think I'm looking more at the pH level of my mixture than I am necessarily the temperature, I, because I stay so hot, so I'm just kind of doing some numbers. If I'm 90 degrees and 80% of humidity, I'm gonna be at 170 total. You know, that's gonna be when I walk outta my house. So I, I'm never in the range during the, you know, hot times of the year where I'm able to do that. But, but I think, I think that's something to look at for sure. And as Temple alluded, the pH you know, the half-life of some of these chemicals you take a fungicide if your pH is, is is way high, it's like 30 minutes and then you go to high fly for the fungicide. So there's a lot more things to look at besides just the temperature. But I think the temperature is super important By the way. Okay, so, uh, uh, Rosa Dog is just fine. She's in here with me now. Anyway, uh, flocculation our friend will the producer of everything that you see at Extreme Ag and I encourage you go and check out all the stuff at Extreme Ag including our show. The Grainery like eight episodes have been released. It's awesome. It's me and these guys right here sitting around my on-farm hangout and we're talking about real stuff that impacts real farms. It's the personal, it's the business side, it's the family side, it's everything that you guys wanna talk about. We invite you to figuratively pull up a chair to the Grainery and you can find those episodes on our YouTube channel. Go to Extreme Mags YouTube channel and subscribe. It doesn't cost anything. Go to Extreme Mag Farm also on Acres tv, check it out in the Grainery. It's really cool stuff. A lot of fun. It's our, our our new show and it's awesome. You're gonna like it. But anyway, will PI types in here flocculation? 'cause I was going down this road, Lee, I was going down this road right here. Uh, Flo, Flo, Flo Kate or Flo Kate, you tell me which one it is. Anyway, I mean, you know, from a simple one room schoolhouse. I was gonna go with the flow hyphen The top one, but I'll let, I'll just let you wing it. You know, Flocculation is a process by which a chemical coagulant added to the water acts to facilitate bonding between particles, creating larger aggregates that are easier to separate. The method is widely used in water treatment plants and can also be applied to sample processing for monitoring applications. So the reason it works for you is It's loosening up the ground. It's, it's, it's making things more available. It's like breaking the bonds within the soil to a degree. Well, and some something I wanna say, Mr. Lee, you know, I learned more on a webinar when I'm doing a webinar then probably the information I give, but that fulvic acid, you know, in the, in the hotter times that that's making it. I I mean what you're, you know, what you're talking about with the steato, that automatically opens the steato. That, that's got me thinking really hard. I Know, I know people, they, you, you say fulvic and you go, well, fulvic is a fulvic. No. Uh, what we run is a food grade very refined. There's a lot of research showing that plants react better to anything that's refined at a food grade level. It's no different than livestock, uh, which feed for livestock or anything else. Food. Great. Uh, better absorption rates. Uh, what the fulvic does is it opens up the stemmata. It's more or less well like temple talked about, the plant is respirating, you're making it respirate. And then we also run the spray tech every acre. We run that and the fulvic. But actually when, what the fulvic what it can do is it can take your ADA and make it open sevenfold, not 7%, but sevenfold. And that gets your products into the plant instead of drying off, burning off during the heat of the day. So, uh, it just increases your efficacy and well, you look at how many thousands is in of dollars of product is in your spray tank on average. Don't you wanna maximize that? I do. I don't wanna raise waste 30, 40%, By the way, I love that, that we were talking about smart strategies to boost fertility ROI and we've gone down the road of, uh, things that open this ADA that also then increase the efficacy that makes the, the thousands of dollars that are in your spray tank actually get absorbed. So this is important. It's why you come to these, uh, webinars and we're glad you did. By the way. Type in your questions. It's always interactive, always informative and sometimes slightly entertaining. I mean, if I'm on my A game, let's face it, sometimes I'm not. Speaking of which, I'll go to my most entertaining guy, temple Rhodes, um, wrap me up on this idea about maximizing your fertility. ROI, the trials that you did were eye-opening and now we're in a low commodity price environment. You have absolutely changed. You've been farming since the eighties. You're changing your outlook on fertility completely because of just some of the stuff that you've been trialing. Yeah, I mean you we're still raising the yield we're our yields haven't changed. If anything, my Temple's got a bad connection. You got a bad connection buddy. All right, we'll go back. Hang on. You got bad connection. Uh, check on it. Maybe, maybe Alexander's probably over watching a video or something right now and he is getting into your connection. All right, Mr. Matt, Look, I did that. Look, I did that. You always call people Mr and use your first name. I'm going Mr. Matt, um, on the fertility thing, you've changed your game a lot and you're talking about everything you're gonna do to maximize your fertility and all of your inputs, frankly, not just fertility and you're dealing with the heat, you're dealing with locomotive price, et cetera, et cetera. A change that you're making this year. Um, we've absolutely been reducing our nitrogen. You know, we're using some products like Pivot Bio to create some of the nitrogen that's stable, you know, that can't be leaked. But we are seeing that we can reduce our nitrogen and I think we've been over applying nitrogen and we've also used some products to make our phosphorus better. You know, unbind it from the calcium and do some things to get it more in the plant. Um, potassium, I mean, I've got kind of a negative result. I, I tried to go with just my litter last year, then it cost me money. So I'm gonna pay a lot more attention to my potassium needs and make sure I don't short that. The problem, the thing we gotta watch is not to cut our, you know, not to cut the wrong places. You know, it, you know, it's a bad economy. We gotta figure out what to do, but don't, don't save yourself out of business. And I, and I had some mistakes last year trying to do that. We covered this by the way, and one of our cutting the curve podcasts, again, they're all free, they're all there. It's a library of information. I've been recording at least, uh, 70 plus per year for the last several years. And they're all there. Go and check 'em out. And we talked about the apparel of trying to save yourself into prosperity. Yeah, you wanna cut back? Yeah, you wanna be frugal. Yeah, you wanna make smart decisions about your inputs, but you know what, uh, cutting too much ends up costing you. As Matt talked about. Uh, you, you can, you can, you can drop dollars to pick up dimes, I guess is the old saying, right? Yep. Yep, that's true. Just be careful what you do. Make sure you cut your cost in the right spot. I think nitrogen's one of the, one of those, and I think our, our efficiencies with phosphorus is another one. Matt's un unknowingly teeing us up for the March 13th webinar. We're not gonna do it the first Thursday of March 'cause we're gonna be just coming home from Commodity Classic. Again. We invite you all to join us at Commodity Classic. We're gonna be in all the vendor booths. We're gonna be all around that show. We're also gonna be doing that pancake breakfast on Sunday morning, March 2nd, 9:45 AM The guys are gonna be walking around talking to you, shaking hands, talking about all the stuff that's impacting you. Then we're gonna do a, a game show, a farm version of the match game. It's gonna be a lot of fun. We encourage you to come to that. In fact, we want you to come to it. If you don't come to it, I'll be offended because I've got a gene ray burn suit from the 1970s. Um, what Matt also teased about, uh, reduction of nitrogen. That's our topic of the March 13th webinar on March 13th. We're gonna be covering, are you still over applying nitrogen? We're not even saying as a question, we're saying you are, you are probably over applying nitrogen because you've probably just been doing it the same way. Even if you're getting smart about it, you're probably still using more nitrogen applied than you need to. We're gonna figure out how you can reduce that nitrogen spend and that's gonna be a big thing. Yes, Matt. Alright, so, so on that subject, and I know we ne we gotta go, but if we can reduce our nitrogen, we've got money there to spend somewhere else. Micronutrients. So we always thought that just throwing extra nitrogen out there makes a better corn crop. We figured out that that's not true. We're actually putting out too much. So if we can cut that budget, we're, we're not paying enough attention in the United States to Micros. If you throw more nitrogen out there, you gotta throw more micros out there. Well, most of us are showing on micros anyway, so we can reallocate that money. Yeah, you're you're, you're using and, and Lee's nodding his head, you're probably putting out nitrogen unnecessarily. That's not getting, I, the last thing I read, I was there with you guys. 35% of applied nitrogen gets in the plant. That means two thirds of what you're spending is not actually going where it needs to be. So there's room for, there's room for, uh, discretion. Yes, Lee, Absolutely. Uh, we won't broadcast urea without having sulfur in the blend. Uh, we won't do it without boron because the boron on and the sulfur make our urea work so much better. Our use rates and efficacy goes up so much and higher and it gets into the plant so much more. We get so much more bang for the buck by doing that. And that's saying trim a few dollars off of the urea and invested in the boron, you're gonna get rewarded really well. Yeah. So the March 13th webinar is really all about nitrogen and the fact that you can cut back on your application of nitrogen, you can save a lot of money and still not sacrifice. Yield. We're gonna be joined by Johnny Rell, Kelly Garrett and Temple Rhodes on that one. If Temple has a connection, we're, we might even have an agronomist, uh, hopping on that call. Anyway. Couple questions. John Burson says, on your last foliar shot on corn during the R stages, are you using a standard mix? Are you basing it on tissue and SAP analysis? Temple Go Lee, Can you hear me? Oh, temple Cutting up or Yeah, we got you. Go ahead, temple. Okay, Your last foliar shot. Are you, are you basing your last foliar shot based on, is it standard mix or are you doing it based on tissue and sap or sap? It's not, it's not a standard mix. It, I mean it is kind of a standard mix, but it, it has been based off of my years of data off my tissue samples or when I knew that, what I know that that plant needs at that time. And it's also based off of that, that curve that I told you about, you know, when we talked about that illustration that natures have, it's based off of those two things and those two things only. Well, phosphorus and sulfur be in the mix on that last pass at the R stages. Absolutely, a hundred percent. Got it. Dustin asked the question, People don't realize how much, okay, go ahead. No Go. Well people don't realize how much phosphorus is used in not only corn but in soybeans as well. In the R stages, over 60% of your needs for phosphorus and corn and beans both is used in the our stages and we throw all of our phosphorus down upfront in front of that plant. And, and by the way, we're throwing phosphorus in soil that we're only gonna get back 30% of it. That's the maximum we're gonna get back. So what are we doing? Let's be efficient. Dustin asked the question. Uh, companies that you use for food grade fulvic and or product names if you will. Uh, we use a fulvic, uh, that we source and uh, Kelly actually sells it through integrated ag and we really like it. Uh, it's such a low use rate, half ounce per acre. Uh, do you do have a product? Do you have a product name for Lee? Uh, basically it's just, it's referred to as a fulvic acid and uh, but but it's actually refined food grade and it's, and it's the way it's refined, it's a cold process. That's the one thing I spent a lot of years researching humic and phobic, how it's made is a big key and how it works and that's what the beauty of this product is. It's refined in a very specific manner and a slow use rate and it's reasonable to put on breaker and, hey, I'm a farmer. I love good and cheap. You know, we all do. Matt, you got anything on food grade fulvic? No, I've never used any. I don't, I don't guess. But what Lee, what Lee's saying is absolutely correct. It's how they process the phobics and Helix has a lot to do with what, what efficacy they have or how they work. Sticking with the questions we got great interaction by the way. I love it when you guys are asking questions. It makes it a lot of fun for, for all of us. Gordon Briggs asked the questions, is there a place for ammonia ized zinc in our fertility applications? Anybody? I would have to know what that is. Lee. Uh, our experience with ammonia zincs was years ago in, uh, when retailers had tried to push it to us and starter blends and uh, when you open the shuttle and it'll about knock you over 'cause it, you swear you are, uh, walking by a Turkey barn and you go, this is this gonna be good for soil biology? Then you start researching and, and you, uh, do a lot of trials and, and do some reading and uh, it was really detrimental to, well it was killing a lot of our biology that we were trying to run in furrow. So personally we stay away from Ammoniated zinc we have for 20 years, so. Got it. All right. I think we're gonna leave it there. It's been a great webinar. We invite you to the March 13th webinar. We're talking about over application of nitrogen, how you can stop. It's really about trying to help you reduce your nitrogen spend 'cause you're probably spending it unnecessarily based on a lot of the trials. Johnny Rell and Kelly in particular have done a lot of trials on this and are gonna be joined by temple, maybe even agronomist on April, April 3rd. We're doing, is your machinery making you money right now as we are doing this, the machinery show in Louisville is going on and you know what? Let's face it. Machinery is farm porn. We love looking at it. Big beautiful machines, they're all shiny. It's neat. But guess what, are you actually getting your ROI It's the second biggest expense on farms behind land. Are you actually punching out? Are you getting caught up in the porn aspect of machinery? Are you actually running it as the investment that it is and getting the return from it? We're gonna cover that in April. We got really good solid episodes, solid topics for all of the or 2025 on our extreme ag webinars. I can go through all of 'em but I won't bore you. I also wanna invite you to our field days. They start in May, you might well put these on your calendar. Our first field day of the of the year is at May 22nd. It's at Henderson Farms in Mass, Alabama. May 22nd is gonna begin in the morning. Chad does a great job down there and you, the cool thing, instead of a field day always coming at the end of the season, you can see a field day in the early part of the season where they're doing things that you can see in process. From there we go to June 12th at Miles Farms. That's Matt Miles the guy sitting right here wearing his vest. We're gonna be at Miles Farms. It starts early in the morning 'cause it always gets hot and humid. It's a great deal if you're an extreme ag member, you can come to the dinner the night before, mix and mingle, then you come to the field day the morning of you get, see all the business partners we have and see the extreme ag guys see me. Not that that matters but it might and we have a really good time. We learn a lot of stuff there. Um, signups will be on our website starting in mid-March, so if you want to enroll sign up. They're free to attend these uh, field days, but we wanna make sure that we know you're coming. So you can do that starting a month from now in mid-March. You'll be able to get in there and sign up. May 22nd is our first field day, June 12th at Miles Farms, then June 26th at Garrett Land and Cattle. We then have August field days at all the guys farms. We want you to come to 'em. It's a lot of fun. It's also very educational, it's social, it's informative and it's also fun. We want you to be there. Uh, till next time, I wanna also remind you that if come to extreme ag uh, uh, involvement at all the field days but also at Commodity Classic, we're gonna be there. We want you to be there and you know what you can only learn and and help your farming operation become a better, more locating operation. Oh, look at that Lee. How I just drew that in there. By the way, if you come to a commodity classic, we haven't seen Lee for a little while with all of his new hair. I'm gonna bring some of my mousse. So Lee, looking at this, I'm gonna bring you some of my different kinds of MOUs you can put in your hair and we're gonna style him a little bit. He's gonna have some poofy kind of spiky hair. He's gonna be great. You looking forward to that Lee? Absolutely. Well it happens besides Damon, it was not gonna work on the top like yours. He's Gonna look like a heat measure from that, uh, from that children's Christmas show. Anyway, he's Lee ERs from Gregory South Dakota. He's joined by Matt Miles from McGee, Arkansas Temple Roads who had to cut out because he had a bad connection. And also me and Willow Ste. The guys behind the scenes sometimes here at extreme ag. Till next time, we will see you at Commodity Classic. We'll see you at all of our stuff online. You know what? Check it out. The Grainery show, the Cutting the Curve, the other programs we put out there, extreme Mag Farm. Till next time, thanks for being here and thanks for Temple. Comment on back on now. Till next time, I'll see you everywhere we can see you. Thanks for being here. 01:13:07.415 --> 01:13:07.845